


Bis zum letzten Mann

by raumdeuter



Category: Football RPF
Genre: Alternate Universe - Zombie Apocalypse, Alternate Universe - Zombies Run! Fusion, M/M, Past Character Death, Pre-Relationship
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-11-01
Updated: 2015-11-01
Packaged: 2018-04-27 23:10:32
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,093
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5068468
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/raumdeuter/pseuds/raumdeuter
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>When Auba is sent out to retrieve a potential cure for the Grey Plague from a Dortmund hospital, the return trip may take him through a part of town--and a host of old memories--he never thought he'd visit again. </p><p>Zombies, Run! AU.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Bis zum letzten Mann

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Imkerin](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Imkerin/gifts).



“It’s all here,” says Auba breathlessly, staring down at the contents of the briefcase. “All the samples, the notebooks, the data. Just like you said, boss.” But when his headset flares back to life, it isn’t the Major on the other end.

“Well, Runner 17,” says a voice Auba hasn’t heard in a _long_ fucking time, “don’t just stand there looking at it, pick it up and do your job,” and just like that Auba’s face splits into a grin so wide it hurts.

“ _Marco,_ ” he says. “What the hell, bro, did they let you out of house arrest early?”

“Something like that,” says Marco airily. “You know how it is, they’d all go grey without me running the show. You’re sure everything’s in there?”

“Yeah.” He doesn’t say what both of them are thinking, that this might be it, the key to the cure they’ve all been waiting for. Putting the thought into words might jinx it somehow. Instead he snaps the briefcase shut, slides it carefully into his backpack. “Where to?”

“Stairwell, down the hall and to your left. Runner 10 says he saw a pack of zoms go into the main lobby--slow, but enough of them to cause trouble. You’ll have to leave by the emergency exit.”

“Will do,” says Auba, taking the stairs down four at a time. A shambler raises its head as he vaults past, but it’s too slow to react; he slams the door shut on its half-rotted face, and he’s gone. He’s still grinning as he jumps back over the fence running the perimeter of the hospital grounds, leaving a couple more shamblers in his wake.

“Incoming on your six, bro,” says Marco, and Auba glances back, counts maybe four or five zoms headed towards him from the direction of the parking lot. These long runs into the city proper are usually more trouble than they’re worth; it’s been ages since anyone’s gone out on one. But then there had been the crashed helicopter, the sole survivor, the reports of a cure, too tempting to ignore--

Anyway. Here he is, headed back to Emscher with the briefcase a reassuring weight against his back. He smirks, flips the shamblers the bird, and runs.

There’s a calm that comes when he’s out on missions. Auba’s feet settle by themselves into a steady rhythm until he’s barely even thinking about the movement and the miles and the zoms have dropped away behind him. His breath comes in slow and goes out even, like he’s meditating. He could run for days like this, his heart beating steady, the pavement blurring beneath his feet.

How long has it been since Marco was last assigned to him? Two weeks? Three? Emscher Township is a pretty big settlement, with well over a hundred runners and a comms team at least half that size. You never really know who you’re going to be matched up with on a mission, although if you’re on the Major’s good side like Auba is you can usually count on getting one of the best.

And Marco--Marco’s one of the best. _Dortmunder Jung_ , like most of the guys on comms. Knows the city like the back of his hand. Was a pizza delivery guy or something before the plague hit, or so he says. Auba’s never actually met him in person, Emscher being the size it is, but he trusts Marco more than anyone else in the world, except maybe the major. Before the Grey Plague he might’ve thought that was a bit much, putting that kind of faith in a disembodied voice in your ear, but it turns out the end of the world can kind of change your perspective on things.

It’s that same voice that snaps him back to reality now. “Runner 17,” says Marco, “we’ve got a problem.”

He sounds serious, or as serious as Auba’s ever heard him. Auba doesn’t stop running, but he does slow down a little, glancing around for any signs of danger. The street he’s on is deserted, as far as he can tell, but he’s been on enough missions to know how quickly that can change.

“Go on,” he says.

“Zoms,” says Marco, because it’s never fucking anything else, is it. “Listen--you’ve still got the briefcase, right?”

“What,” says Auba, keeping his voice light, “you think I might’ve gotten bored and chucked it in the last five minutes?”

“No. No! It’s just,” and here Marco hesitates, which is when Auba really starts to worry. “We think there might be something in it that’s attracting the fast ones. Runner 10’s reporting a whole pack of them in Westfalenpark just peeled off away from him and towards you.”

“Westfalenpark,” repeats Auba, slowly, and before he can process the word properly he rounds a corner and finds himself in the past.

He hadn’t known he was so close--he hadn’t really thought about it, to be honest. Since the world ended there’d been a million other things to worry about, and when the Major had offered him this mission he hadn’t even considered where he might be going, or what he might be passing by.

He’s considering it now.

_Shit._

“Bro?” crackles Marco in his ear. “Bro, you still there? Runner 17?”

“I’m here,” says Auba.

“Runner 10’s turning on his noisemaker now, but we haven’t tested it on the fast ones yet,” says Marco. “You gotta move.”

“Yeah,” says Auba. He bounces, once, on the balls of his feet. In the distance he can hear the faint whine of Miki running interference. He’s a good half mile away, judging by the sound. Maybe too far away to do any good. “Yeah, I know. I’m thinking.”

“Think faster,” says Marco, “it doesn’t sound like you have a lot of time,” and Auba turns and yeah, that’s a fuckload of zoms coming out of the trees, right on cue.

He could beat them in a flat-out sprint on open ground, easy, but here, where the road is all but blocked with abandoned cars, it’s out of the question. Auba takes a deep breath.

“I’m going in,” he says, and before Marco can ask where, before he can talk himself out of it, he runs under the shadow of the faded yellow pylons and into the stadium.

 

\---

 

He almost expects it to feel different. It should feel different, after what happened. But it looks the same as it always has, smells the same. Even the patina of dust across the floor is barely there, as if someone had come by and cleaned it a week ago, instead of months. Early days, he thinks, when people still thought you could be saved if you caught the plague. When people still bothered to clear away the bodies, afterwards. It doesn’t look like anyone’s been here since then.

Auba runs, his footsteps echoing painfully loud in his ears. In front of him the familiar hallways stretch into darkness. He counts maybe fifteen seconds before he hears the first zombies clawing at the doors behind him, which isn’t much of a lead but better than the one he had before.

“Hey,” crackles Marco. “Runner 17. If you get out of this alive, I’m thinking we should meet up. Like, for real.”

It’s stupid, but the fact that he’s still on the line is...kind of soothing. It’s nice. Feels like there’s someone running next to him. “I’ll bring the candles and the tablecloth,” says Auba. “You can bring the canned sardines in tomato sauce and powdered milk.”

“I’m serious, bro,” says Marco, sounding wounded, and Auba only laughs in response.

The zoms break through the doors faster than expected, but it sounds like some of them get tripped up on the glass, and by then Auba’s far enough away he can barely even hear them. By some miracle, the door to the locker room is unlocked, and he spends a few precious seconds barricading it shut after him before he reaches into his backpack and clicks on his flashlight.

Massage room--showers--lockers. The flashlight beam illuminates spotless floors, clean benches. Auba could navigate this place with his eyes closed. He tries not to think about that, about where he is, focuses instead on how many doors there are, each one a chance to bottleneck the zoms coming after him.

“Runner 17,” says Marco, and his voice is distorted, choppy. “Runner 17--report--”

“Still here, bro,” says Auba. He doesn’t get an intelligible response, but then he doesn’t really expect one. Reception’s always been shitty down here. He piles ice bath tubs, one on top of the other, in the long hallway leading out of the locker room, and turns and sprints towards the mixed zone with a third in tow.

 

\---

 

Dortmund had been playing Arsenal that night. They’d heard the reports coming in from England, of course. Who hadn’t? But they’d figured the airlines would have caught any fan too sick to fly, so they’d gone ahead with the match.

There’d been a corner kick in the sixty-first minute. Schmelle had been about to take it when the ref had blown his whistle: apparently an ultra had bitten someone, and then things had gotten ugly fast in the stands. He knows that now, although at the time he hadn’t really understood. When the crowd in front of you is twenty-five thousand strong you don’t really see violence in any kind of detail, only the push and pull of yellow and black, like vast waves, and at first the screaming had all sounded the same.

It doesn’t seem right to Auba, even now, that he doesn’t remember where he was when it started. He doesn’t even remember the score. With something like that you ought to remember everything: every movement, every blade of grass, every smell, so you can tell the people who weren’t there to see it when they ask _where were you when it happened, Auba?_

_Where were you when the Yellow Wall turned grey?_

 

\---

 

Block the door behind him, head for the reporters’ entrance, leave the same way he came out. It’s not a bad plan, considering he came up with it on the fly. And it almost works, except five zoms come bursting out of the exact doors he plans to go through, and when he pivots sharply on his heel, three more emerge from the gaping hole where the away locker room door used to be, and, well, that’s one more escape route cut off.

Just as he thinks it, both the ice tub and the door it’s blocking start to rattle. Auba almost laughs. The zoms in front of him are only shamblers, but they don’t need to be fast. Not when there’s only one direction left for him to run, and the fast ones are seconds away.

One makes a rasping noise and reaches for him, and Auba half-skips back, grimacing. This one is still wearing scraps of black and yellow, and bile rises up in his throat at the sight--ridiculous, he knows, considering the kinds of things he’s seen over the last year. But this--this feels even more wrong than usual. Sacrilegious, almost. Like one last middle finger to everything this place means to him.

He glances into the tunnel, or tries to. He’s lucky if the flashlight illuminates more than five feet in front of him; past that it’s so oppressively pitch-black the darkness feels more like a solid. “Marco,” he says. “You there?”

Something rustles in his ear and he swings around, heart racing. Static, or more zoms? He can’t tell. Auba backs up a step into the tunnel, then another. The flashlight beam canvasses bare walls, blank tile.

“Marco,” he says, like reception’s ever been any better in the tunnel than in the locker room. “Bro, gimme a signal or something.”

Nothing. The ice tub is really moving now, the door almost vibrating on its hinges. Behind it he can hear groaning and the dull scrape of nails on wood. The shamblers inch towards him, and Auba grits his teeth, retreats into the darkness. With any luck, the double doors to the pitch won’t still be barricaded shut--

They are.

Before he even has time to feel disappointment, a hand clamps down on his shoulder from behind and spins him around, and Auba finds himself staring into a face he didn’t think he’d ever see again.

 

\---

 

Security had tried to hurry them off the pitch as quickly as possible. They’d argued, of course. Kevin had fought them all the way to the tunnel, until Kloppo had stepped in. But even Kevin had to have known something was wrong by then.

This is the part where his memory kicks in, but only just. Hundreds--thousands of people had started pouring over the fence and onto the pitch towards them--whether in escape or in pursuit, they couldn’t have said--and some of them had been bleeding. Some of them hadn’t been, which was worse. He remembers brief, absurd snapshots--Giroud laying out a grey-faced man with a fist, Wenger throwing that fucking jacket over someone’s head. Kloppo shoving a slightly dazed Kevin at him, shouting at him to run.

He remembers obeying, after a fashion--Kevin had fought him too, then--but what else could he have done? By then both teams had started to press for the exit, and they were swept up in the crowd.

They hadn’t realized Kloppo had stayed behind until after the tunnel doors had slammed shut.

 

\---

 

For a long moment neither of them move. Auba can hear his own breath harsh in his ears. He can’t--Christ, he can’t hear Kloppo’s. The hand on his shoulder is vice-tight and very, very cold.

Behind him, one of the shamblers lets out a long, drawn-out rattling sound. Closer now. The sound snaps him back into the present, reminds him of the priceless cargo in his backpack: he grabs Kloppo’s wrist, tries to pry him off, but it’s like trying to bend iron and Kloppo just fucking _stands_ there, like he’s trying to decide whether or not Auba’s even worth the effort, and that's when Auba realizes it's not really Kloppo in there, not anymore.

(They’d tried to go back for him. They’d tried, and even the Arsenal players had joined in--Poldi and Mesut and Per first, of course--but by then security had tripled, and there had been these  _sounds_  from the stadium outside...

They hadn't found a body. They hadn't found a lot of bodies, after. He supposes, now, that it ought to have meant something to him at the time, but you heard things over the radio--rumors, sightings in other townships--he’d hoped, maybe--)

Auba opens his mouth to say something--anything--but nothing comes out. He’s not sure it would be any use. His flashlight beam keeps fucking shaking for some reason, and in the wavering light Kloppo’s eyes are lighter than he remembered them being behind the clouded glasses. For some reason the idea of Kloppo still wearing his glasses is hysterically funny.

A splintering noise, a thud, a screech. Kloppo doesn’t even flinch; Auba does. The fast zoms pour in through the ruined doorway, and maybe, he thinks, maybe there are worse ways to go grey than this. Probably worse ways to spend the rest of your undeath, too, than roaming the grounds of your former stadium with your former coach.

He hopes he’s one of the fast ones, because it’d be really fucking embarrassing if he turns out to be a shambler. He hopes Miki’s figured out where he’s gone, because it’d also be really fucking embarrassing if he fucked up the mission and lost the cure like this. He hopes those two things don’t happen at the same time, because he can definitely outrun Miki, undead or not. He hopes--he hopes Marco--

“I’m sorry,” he says, and then, slowly, “Coach--”

Something shatters next to his ear. For one horrible moment he thinks it’s his arm, but then Kloppo’s fist blurs and the door behind him swings open on one wrecked hinge. Auba jerks away instinctively and is surprised to find that he can: the vicegrip on his shoulder is gone, and in the sunlight pouring in behind him he sees Kloppo turn, sees him throw himself unhesitatingly at the oncoming swarm--

A burst of static in his ear, Marco’s voice, saying, “--me in, Runner 17, oh, god, say something,” and Auba runs. He runs, something inside him twisting, maybe snapping, and he doesn’t look back.

 

\---

 

He doesn’t slow down until he’s well outside the city limits.

“You know,” Marco says conversationally, as Auba slides down an embankment and heads into an overgrown field, “it sounded like you knew your way around back there, before I lost contact.”

Auba’s quiet for a long while, long enough that Marco might figure he’s run into a dead spot, except he can probably hear the static of Auba breathing in and out.

“Bro,” says Marco. “Runner 17?”

“Auba,” says Auba, “it’s Auba,” and it’s Marco’s turn to fall silent now. Auba runs, counts his breaths, in and out, deep and even.

When Marco finally speaks again there are a hundred unspoken questions, and something like awe, in his voice. “I heard you calling someone ‘coach’ in there,” he says.

“I--” says Auba, and falters. Suddenly the briefcase is an impossible weight between his shoulderblades. “I used to be a footballer,” he says. “Once upon a time. Did you ever--”

“My sister bought me tickets once,” says Marco.

“Yeah?”

“Yeah. It wasn’t that great a match, to be honest.” Marco laughs nervously. “It ended early because an ultra bit someone.”

It shouldn’t be funny. It shouldn’t even be a little bit funny. But Auba snorts before he can help it, and Marco chuckles for real this time, and before either of them know what’s happening they’re both laughing, or making noises close to it, and Auba has to stop in the middle of the field and put his hands on his knees because he can’t see where he’s going for the tears in his eyes.

He stays there for a while, not moving. Behind him the sun is hanging low in the horizon like an overripe fruit, and in the distance he can see the lights of Emscher Township starting to flicker on. Marco’s laughter is still echoing, wild with relief, in his ears.

“Come back safe, Auba,” he says, and Auba smiles shakily, latches onto it like a lifeline, follows it home.

**Author's Note:**

> Enormous thanks to everyone who held my hand through my first exchange fic! I'll put up individual credits after reveals!
> 
> (For the record, the cure definitely works and they go back and unzombify Kloppo, and don't let anybody tell you otherwise.)


End file.
